Chicago area psychiatrist skates on license despite numerous infractions
Dr. Jonathan Gamze has been treated with kid gloves by his licensing board.
There is no question that in his long career Dr. Jonathan Gamze has affected people for the better.
In preparation for this article, I spoke with Kim Ahern.
She told me that her son is now thirty-six, married, and is an engineering consultant.
At thirteen, such an outcome seemed like a pipe dream.
He had what Kim described as “severe ADHD.”
He had an incident.
A classmate was picking on his younger sister on a bus, calling her horrible names.
Her son came to his sister’s rescue, a situation which escalated until her son pulled a knife.
Kim emphasized that this was not a harmful knife, but one the school gave him, but he pulled a knife, nonetheless.
In the aftermath of Colombine, the school was having none of it.
He was expelled.
Enter Dr. Gamze. Upon the referral of another psychologist, Dr. Gamze examined her son.
He determined that her son was not properly medicated.
He was taking a medication which needed to be administered multiple times daily.
Dr. Gamze switched him to medication which he took once a day.
Within a week, her son had a whole transformation.
Dr. Gamze wrote a letter, and through Kim’s tenacity, the school reversed its expulsion decision.
The rest, as they say, is history, and her son enjoys success today.
He has learned to cope with ADHD.
Kim told me that Dr. Gamze was critical in her son’s turnaround, and he took a complex situation, cut through it, and figured out the solution.
It’s not all positive experiences with Dr. Gamze. On Yelp, he has thirteen reviews. Some are bad like this one.
This doctor showed a complete lack of regard of care in terms of medicine. I was exceptionally disappointed with the amount of disrespect flagrantly thrown straight in my face, though not literally. I just felt as though my money was stolen. Dinero. I needed that cash 4theapwle
Of the thirteen, nine are five-star reviews, including Kim’s, while only three are one-star reviews. Here is another five-star review.
In the years that I've been seeing Dr. Gamze, I've never really met another doctor with the capacity for such compassion, and interest in his patients. I would recommend - and have recommended - him to many people looking for a psychiatrist in the area.
I will freely admit that when I first walked into his office (long before it was located here), I was more than opposed to taking medications, because I knew it wasn't an exact science. He was polite, and listened to me as I listed my doubts; he didn't tell me I was wrong, but instead told me that he felt that sometimes, people require an extra push to escape depression.
He let me know that I didn't have to take a medication I felt wasn't working, so long as I gave it a chance (i.e. - several weeks to start doing *something*), and contacted him if I had questions, concerns, or needed someone to talk to.
He's actually a really wonderful person.
I reached out to all the reviewers, but only Kim responded.
He was also previously sued, a suit which was dismissed.
Dr. Gamze’s career is more than three decades long. Good and bad reviews are to be expected.
What’s more troubling is the numerous Department of Financial and Professional Regulation infractions. Here are three orders: one, two, and three.
Dr. Gamze sued an attorney who represented him.
He then subsequently retained Jacqueline Stein, who was not sued.
I reached out to Dr. Gamze and to Ms. Stein. Ms. Stein did not respond to my email, while Dr. Gamze declined to comment when reached by phone.
In the course of this litigation, the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation noted that the findings were tame compared to what the Department could have done.
This is a shocking admission. This suggests that Dr. Gamze was overprescribing medication on a mass scale.
Yet, he continues to practice in good standing.
This is another example of the haphazard and unequal way in which medical license discipline is administered.
In February 2022, I interviewed Jim Singer who had his medical license terminated for what amounted to a coding error.
More on Jim’s story here.
Dr. Eric Hensen was facing a suspension of his license for not requiring masks in his office in 2020.
More than a decade ago, I did a story about a nurse in Texas targeted by the Texas Medical Board, after the nurse exposed how patients were used as guinea pigs.
Corrupt or sham peer reviews use the peer review process to unfairly take licenses from whistleblowing doctors.
The medical licensure process is uneven, with punishment doled out in varying degrees depending on the doctor it targets. This is another example.
How does a doctor get away with misprescribing/overprescribing drugs that can be dangerous or even life threatening, on this large scale, and for so long???
This is an issue which I have studied extensively, and has affected me personally.
Licensing boards were set up ostensibly to protect public health; unfortunately, they have devolved into a cross between cronyism & state-sponsored extortion, pushing doctors into whatever supports the status quo and makes the board the most money, rather than what is actually in the best interests of public health.
Anyone can file a complaint, even someone who has never actually been a patient or set foot in the doctor's office. Doctors have been targeted for investigation because they underwent marital counseling years ago, or because they wore too much cologne and someone thought they smelled like alcohol. And once an allegation has been made, there is little chance of making it through an investigation unscathed - if the board has to spend any time or money looking into a matter, they will inevitably find some way of recouping their costs.
A doctor accused of suspected substance abuse issues or mental health concerns is often given a choice: go along with the board, be placed on probation, and be forced into "treatment" programs that are in cahoots with the board, with fees of $50k or more, essentially having their license held for ransom (Kernon Manion does an excellent job of going into the details of how these schemes work). If they refuse, the board drives them through a sham hearing, denies them access to their own health records, pays trumped-up "experts" to diagnose them under dubious pretenses, and hits them with huge fines & career-ending black marks, even if they have never been convicted of any crime, there is no evidence that patient care was ever placed at risk or standards of care were not being met, and despite any evidence that the doctor does not actually have any substance abuse or mental health issues. There's no real oversight of board decisions - in a hearing, the judge only makes recommendations, which the board is free to ignore, and appeals are time-consuming & expensive, with little chance of success. And of course only excessive punishments get appealed - were it not for the work of real, independent journalists such as yourself, these excessively light sentences would never be subjected to any judicial oversight or brought to the attention of the public.
In this case, I would guess that, because he's going along with the prescription drug model and thus still making money for big pharma, they went easy on him despite actual risks to patient safety. Many other doctors who challenge the paradigm by suggesting that the childhood vaccine schedule may be doing more harm than good (such as Dr. Shari Tenpenny) or by promoting COVID treatments other than the mRNA vaccine like hydroquinone (such as the member doctors of the FLCCC community) end up having their licenses suspended even though there may be no patient complaints, no evidence of any risk to public health, and no valid reasons for the board to get involved.
The boards don't care about the damage caused to public health by depriving a community of a caring, skilled physician. It happened to a friend of mine, who turned in his licensing renewal one day late. The board refused to accept it, considered his license invalid, and charged him with treating patients without a license, demanding he pay tens of thousands of dollars in fines. Once his name was in their crosshairs, they reviewed his private record (which, as a government agency, they have access to, regardless of whether or not the doctor consents) and, finding he had been arrested for a DWI several years ago, required him to undergo evaluation & treatment for alcohol as well — even though he had been acquitted of the charge, he had no other arrests, there were no complaints from any of his patients, and there was no evidence that his drinking had ever affected his clinical practice in any way. Normally, arrests not resulting in a conviction cannot be used as part of the decision-making process regarding professional licensure; healthcare boards, for some reason, are exempt from this law.
My friend wanted to fight it, but his lawyer knew it would do no good — the state always sides with the board. Refusing to follow the board’s rulings meant no other state would license him, so he was forced to shut down his practice, leave the community he grew up in, and move overseas for several years. Eventually, he returned to the states, but had to set up practice in a neighboring state, as he was now forever forbidden from being licensed in his home state due to his defiance— all because he was a day late turning in a form, and the board saw it as an opportunity to engage in state-sanctioned extortion. He was the only doctor in the entire state who provided a specialized form of care for a common spinal condition; ever since he left, patients suffering from this condition no longer have any options for treatment other than an expensive & controversial surgery that leaves many worse-off in the long-term.
Another friend of mine was at a health fair when a local politician he supported stopped by his booth, and requested a simple & harmless therapy, which my friend provided for free. The politician later changed his stance on an important issue and my friend withdrew his support. In retaliation, the politician reported him to the state board for failing to obtain informed consent. The politician & several witnesses confirmed that he had verbally consented to the procedure, there was no evidence that the doctor had failed to meet standards of care, cause any harm, or place him at risk in any way, and it was well-established that this was a one-time slip-up, not a pattern, as he always obtained signatures from patients in his clinic. Nevertheless, because he didn’t get a signature this one time, he lost his license for two years, and since state law requires the owner of any business offering health services to have a license in that field, he was forced to shut down the business he had spent nearly twenty years building and start all over again from scratch after regaining licensure two years later. Had he been the sole provider, his family would likely have been forced into bankruptcy — fortunately, his wife was a successful businesswoman, and she was able to support them through the calamity — but he estimated that the damage to their family's finances was easily over a million dollars.
It happened to another friend of mine, whose patient was upset after he turned her past-due bill into collections. She complained to the board, and their investigation ultimately found that her complaint had no merit. Rather than close the case, however, they kept investigating the doctor until they finally found a reason to penalize him & recover the money they had spent on their investigation — a minor error in his recordkeeping, easily correctable, for which they fined him ten thousand dollars. He had recently gone through a divorce which had decimated his savings, and was unable to pay it. Rather than allow him to continue practicing & pay it over time, the board revoked his license. This does not seem to make sense until you consider that, to the board, a ten-thousand dollar fine is the equivalent of twenty years of annual fees. They don’t care if a doctor returns to practice or not, or how their decision affects public health — after all, in his case, there was nothing related to patient safety whatsoever. For the state boards, public health is just the mask they use to hide their greed & lust for power.